To animate a still over time, obviously we use a position keyframe at the beginning and ending of a clip. However, in PP CS5.5, when the still has a cross-dissolve transition at the beginning and end, is there any way to add a keyframe to the beginning and end, INCLUDING the portion of the clip that's under the transition? It seems from my trials that jumping to the beginning or end of the clip (using keyboard shortcuts) put you in the middle of the transition, not at the beginning, where you'd need to be to have a smooth start to the animation...

Haven't done this in a while, but if I recall correctly, after you add the transition you can double click the clip on the timeline and go to the effects control tab, and the "handles" will show, where you can drag the existing keyframes or add new ones....

Simply using a keyboard shortcut will indeed only take you to the nominal start and end of the clip, not the handle under the transition.

__________________"It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

Ben, if it's transitions you're talking about, then it's not about keyframing, as it is about control over the actual transition..

Double click on the transition on the timeline, and the "Effects" pallete should pop up in your source window..
Within the effects pallete, you'll see all the options that the particular transition allows for..

To animate a still over time, obviously we use a position keyframe at the beginning and ending of a clip. However, in PP CS5.5, when the still has a cross-dissolve transition at the beginning and end, is there any way to add a keyframe to the beginning and end, INCLUDING the portion of the clip that's under the transition? It seems from my trials that jumping to the beginning or end of the clip (using keyboard shortcuts) put you in the middle of the transition, not at the beginning, where you'd need to be to have a smooth start to the animation...

Any help is appreciated...

don't sweat it, it's easy, you'll need to do an oldfashioned AB edit!

drag the clip to the upper video track and extend it for the duration of the dissolve. Keyframe in the extended part and then either trim it back and bring it down to the original track (leaving the keyframe(s) intact) or just leave it as an AB edit and apply the dissolve there.

@Adam
double clicking the clip in the timeline will bring up the source monitor, you just need to click once to select it.
But you can't really do what Ben wants from effects control panel keyframe panel as it will only show from the beginning to the end of the clip as it is trimmed in the timeline, not the actual length of the clip, so you won't be able to keyframe into or before any transitions there.

edit: I wrote this up wrong in my answer to Adam, you can of course use effect control panel to add keyframes too but no matter how you choose to add them, you'll need to do an AB edit first to be able to keyframe into the transition area.

Yuk! I was hoping there was a faster way.... I guess there are pros and cons to all editing systems... This is super fast and intuitive in FCP, and if you're doing it to 20-50 stills, it takes no time at all.

Well, I learned my craft on a AB edit system so it's pretty natural for me.

It's actually no big deal when you're editing from scratch, just think ahead. It's even easier with stills. Let me break down a technique. Let's say that you want you're stills to play for 5 seconds and have a one second dissolve between the two.
>>Before<< importing the stills in the project, go to preferences and find the setting for default still duration. Remember you want 5 seconds and half a second transition on both sides so you'll enter 6 seconds (in frames). After that input the one second transition to the default transition duration box. And then just put all of the stills on the timeline on one track and then, holding CTRL select every other clip, lift them up to the upper track and move them for one second to overlap the clips on the lower track. And then make sure that the upper track is selected and just go to every edit and add default transition (default is dissolve but you can actually make the default whichever you want).

And now comes the best part, you can copy and paste the keyframes too.
Keyframe one clip as you want then select "Motion" in the effect control panel, copy it with ctrl-c and then select all clips on the timeline and hit ctrl-v.